I'm not dead but in chile

The loyal is alive/I’m not dead fan base may have noticed a bit of a decline in the output of this blog. I haven't done as many irate bloggers do and gone off due to boredom or lack of discipline, I’ve been and still am in the desert planet Chile. Lots of adventures: jawas, stormtroopers, ships, alien life and food is all being recorded in my grey box and I’ll be posting it all soon enough. Stay faithful, stay blogued.

Top ten of 2007

December is the time of year when TV channels, due to a lack of ideas and hibernation, tend to flog off top tens. I've succumbed...below is a list of the most visited 'is alive/i'm not dead' posts:

1. Portal end song
2. Create your own psp theme
3. Louis Bourgeois
4. Wild Gourmets
5. I am Legend
6. Starcraft, Warhammer 40K
7. Art of catching lobsters
8. TV Links shut down
9. Synetics top ten
10. Matthew Barney

Alternative X-mas message

And he said on to his son, “You must be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch them is your real test; to train them is your cause. You will travel across the land searching far and wide. Each Pokemon to understand the power that’s inside.”

Guerrilla consumerism

I went to Brent Cross yesterday which is the equivalent to an American ‘mall’ I suppose. I don’t know if it was all the shiny Christ-mass decorations or all the shiny sales people but something overcame me and I wrote on the screen of a new Imac, “Please buy me, I’m lonely and they abuse us at night.”


I sneaked off behind the ridiculously, oversized, compensating for something, HD TVs. They acted as a sort of epileptic camouflage. There I watched like, well, a weirdo, as innocent shoppers went up and read what was on the screen. Some looked amused, others looked genuinely distressed.


If you wish to join me in this vain attempt ala Project Mayhem, to strike back at the consumerism heat wave that is the run up to xmas, please find yourself a local electronics shop and write something witty on the screen of any nearby computers. You can even send in pictures if you like.

NASA mission to Mars and the Ministry of Space

Mars is further away than Scotland. Further even than the North Pole. According to NASA we won’t be going there for a while yet. Had things taken a different turn as speculated in ‘Ministry of Space,’ which sounds like a governmental department for interior decorators, we’d have been to and settled upon Mars ages ago.


The ‘real’ mission to Mars isn’t likely to launch at the earliest until 2031. In Ministry of Space we’d have been there by 1969! The underlying theories behind the advanced developments in space flight explored in Ministry of Space, are underpinned by the notion that in the last days of WW2, British soldiers got to the scientists at Peenemunde before the U.S or USSR and, especially, they brought Dr. Wernher von Braun and the plans and pieces of the V-2 rocket bomb back to England. The story unfolds that the Ministry was funded by a ‘black budget’, which ultimately turns out to be gold stolen by the Nazis. The driving force behind the Ministry is Jack Dashwood (he’s got one of those thin 40’s lip moustaches and everything) as he acts as a sort of Steve Jobs character, relentlessly pushing the Ministry as hard as possible.


In the alternate 2001 the U.S are about to launch there own space mission and Dashwood is summoned to an orbiting space station, imaginatively named, Churchill Station. He justifies his obsession to his escort, “we moved too fast, of course. But we had no choice. The Ministry of Space was leading Britain out of the Second World War. Our country could not afford to get involved in brushfires and posturing, which would surely have happened.”


Ultimately, when the U.S threaten to reveal to the world where the funding came from, Dashwood replies, “If I am a monster, then England is too. See if England cares, with her free electricity and cheap food and her glorious, unchanging aspect.” It wouldn’t be a ‘ripping yarn’ if there wasn’t some moral to the story and at the very end you see that the black woman who has been acting as Dashwood’s escort in 2001 is changing in a ‘non-white’ staff room, implying that for all the leaps in technology, socially England was still stuck in the 50’s. Despite the heavy handed moral lesson, that feels tacked on, Ministry of Space really captures the spirit of what a ‘British empire’ in space would feel like. It’s the closest you’ll feel to being on the red planet until 2031.

Green judgement by Greenpeace

Sky tells me, through the use of an analogous red chameleon, that if I leave my set top box on standby, it’ll save enough energy to power Birmingham for a month. So, if I turned it off at the mains would the resulting surge of energy melt Birmingham? I’m confused but Greenpeace aren’t. Their ‘Guide to Greener Electronics,’ names, blames, shames and maims all the big electronic companies’ green standards. Nintendo might be winning over young and old alike with their meta-human software but as they’ve been ranked last, we can only conclude that killing off your consumer base via toxicology is a bad move.

Child Prodigies

Usually just mouthing the words, ‘Robin’ and ‘Williams’ is enough to trigger a biological meltdown, causing neurons to simply shut down rather than deal with the memory of any of his prior films. However, in Toys, I distinctly remember a scene where an army of children are raining down virtual death upon unsuspecting digitmits all under the guise of gaming.



When I was an amoeba I used to play Crystal Quest on my Macintosh II (before they got all shiny) and I think it’d be fair to say I was pretty ‘bad ass’ at it. Even so, I don’t think my skills reached the ‘hardcore/nerdcore’ levels of these gaming prodigies: